Light Meter

[Shooter]

Au contraire, the waveform really actually does give you more information... because it tells you what the camera is actually doing with the light you're giving it.


See, here's the thing -- while a light meter can tell you what those ratios are, it cannot tell you what the camera will DO to those ratios. So it's fine and dandy to use a light meter if you've got a flat linear output from your sensor, but... in what camera does that happen? None? You've always got some processing, and the results you'd get from standard gamma are *very* different than the results you'd get from cinelike-D, yet the lighting would be identical.

The waveform would show you what you're actually getting.


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The waveform has no way of showing me entirely what I am getting. eg how does it show me the back light to front light. At least on my meter I can see the light falling on the hemisphere of the device.

The waveform also does not show me everything the camera is doing with the light apart from levels (exposure, tone scale).

Reality for me is meters ,waveforms and quality monitoring are great tools to be used in conjunction but main tool I use is "my eye". I always light to 'my eye ' first.

 

[RyanT]

The waveform has no way of showing me entirely what I am getting. eg how does it show me the back light to front light. At least on my meter I can see the light falling on the hemisphere of the device.

The waveform also does not show me everything the camera is doing with the light apart from levels (exposure, tone scale).

Reality for me is meters ,waveforms and quality monitoring are great tools to be used in conjunction but main tool I use is "my eye". I always light to 'my eye ' first.

Didn't we establish that that is what the meter is good for, is showing you ratios?

Also, how does your meter show you exposure when on all prosumer cameras, you cannot judge exposure with a light meter?

 

[Shooter]

Didn't we establish that that is what the meter is good for, is showing you ratios?

Also, how does your meter show you exposure when on all prosumer cameras, you cannot judge exposure with a light meter?

I guess it depends what tool people are used to.

I use an incident meter for exposing film and I use it for lighting sets and ascertaining the ratios I wish to work with (and repeat). I do not use it for exposing digital video.

I also have a spotmeter that has an IRE scale that I use to determine levels and ratios of parts of my scenes but rarely use that to set exposures.